The release of the RPM package manager 6.1 has been published, which will be used in the release of the Fedora Linux 45 distribution. The project is developed by Red Hat and is used in distributions such as RHEL, Fedora, SUSE, openSUSE, ALT Linux, Rosa Linux, OpenMandriva, Mageia, PCLinuxOS, and Tizen. The project code is distributed under the GPLv2 and LGPLv2 licenses.
In preparing RPM 6.1, a transition to a new version numbering scheme has been made. The first digit of the version changes with the alteration of the RPM package format, while the second changes with the addition of new features and fixes that do not break backward compatibility. The third digit indicates the presence of only bug or vulnerability fixes. Instead of forming alpha and beta versions for testing, release candidates are now published.
Key changes in RPM 6.1:
- To separate access to the key storage, instead of using a global transaction lock, a separate lock has been implemented, solving the issue of halting the processing of all requests to rpmdb during transaction execution.
- The use of the NSS (Name Service Switch) system for searching users and groups has been restored by default.
- On systems with kernel 5.11+ and glibc 2.34+, the efficiency of closing file descriptors has been increased, which in some cases reduced installation time by up to 26%.
- A new syntax for modifiers for macros (macro_name) has been added, which changes the behavior of macros. Two modifiers have been implemented: 'l' (literal, which disables the processing of the '%' character within the macro body) and 'o' (one-shot, executing the macro only on the first call with subsequent usage of the cached value).
- The expression "fine" has been enhanced with options: "-e" to expand the body of the macro only during its definition and "-g" to place the macro in a global context. The combination of these options is equivalent to the expression "%global."
- Error handling related to assembly and verification has been improved.
- The rpm-plugin-syslog plugin has improved compatibility with systemd-journal.
- The rpmsign utility now has the capability to sign files with a digital signature using PKCS11 tokens.
Source: opennet.ru
